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Apple Intelligence Foundation Language Models Tech Report 2025

machinelearning.apple.com

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Re: Apple Intelligence Foundation Language Models Tech Report 2025

#111

Post by bitpush »

slashnode wrote: post #104
bitpush wrote: post #38

The more I think about Apple, the more I realize that Apple is so far behind. While other companies are pushing the envelope (OpenAI, Anthropic, Google ..) Apple's ambitions seem much much smaller. And this is after they made very big claims with Apple Intelligence last year, when they had everyone fooled. This is like watching a train-wreck in slow motion.

I think it's the right strategy for Apple. They're not a model company. The risks of deploying something half-baked to their users is unacceptable. They're taking it slow and trying to do it in a way that doesn't damage/erode their brand. Wait it out, let the best model(s) rise to the surface (and the hallucination problems to get sufficiently mitigated), and then either partner with a proprietary provider or deploy…

This is a reasonable approach, but unfortunately misses what made Apple soooo successful. Apple is the master of controlling the brand. Apple DOES NOT like to highlight their suppliers. Nobody knows who makes iPhones displays, or sensors, or RAMs.

They love to "invent" brands that they control, so that they can commodotize the underlying supplier. Hey user, it is a retina display and dont worry whether it is LG or Samsung is making it.

Apple tried this with AI, calling it "Apple Intelligence". Unfortunately that faltered. Now Apple will have to come out and say "iPhone with ChatGPT" or "Siri with Claude". AND APPLE HATES THAT. HATES IT WITH PASSION.

People will start to associate smartness with ChatGPT or Claude, and Apple loses control and OpenAI/Anthropic's leverage goes up.

Apple has painted themselves into a corner. And as I said elsewhere, it is a train-wreck happening in slowmotion.

Re: Apple Intelligence Foundation Language Models Tech Report 2025

#112

Post by al_borland »

a_wild_dandan wrote: post #103
al_borland wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You asked 2 questions in a system made for 1 question at a time. Split these up and Siri answers them fine. You’re holding it wrong.

"You haven't contorted your comically simple query enough to make the brittle tool work. Throw the chicken bones better next time."

It’s been this way for over a decade. If someone hasn’t figured it out by now, that’s kind of on them.

I’m not even sure why those two things would be asked as a single question. It seems like a very unnatural way to pose those two questions. Most humans would trip on that, especially if it was asked verbally.

Re: Apple Intelligence Foundation Language Models Tech Report 2025

#113

Post by bitpush »

avianlyric wrote: post #87
Uehreka wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wouldn’t go as far as GP, but yes, absolutely, they must compete with large models on the internet. Customers are now used to being able to ask a computer a question and get something better than “I just ran a web search for what you said, here are the uncurated, unsummarized results”. Yes, this is in fact what people want. Apple is the biggest company in the world (don’t quibble this y’all, you know what I mean) a…

Erm, have you heard of these things called apps? It’s this magical concept where other companies can run code your iPhone, and deliver all the features you just talked about. I don’t really understand why Apple has to provide a ChatGPT product, baked directly into their software. Why on earth would Apple want to get involved in the race to the bottom for the cheapest LLMs? Apple doesn’t produce commodity products, th…

> I don’t really understand why Apple has to provide a ChatGPT product

Control. It boils down to control. If you own a platform, you want to make your "suppliers" (apps in this case) as substitutable as possible.

If people start associating ChatGPT or Claude or Gemini as the main reasons to buy a phone, at some point in the future, they'll think - gee, most of what I'm doing on the phone is interacting with $app, and I can get the $app elsewhere.

Re: Apple Intelligence Foundation Language Models Tech Report 2025

#114

Post by bitpush »

astrange wrote: post #83
const_cast wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This usecase is run of the mill for someone like Google, who used to store and show you your location forever, but it's not in Apple style. It's hard to be like "uhhh privacy" when you send all requests to a remote server where they're stored in clear text for god knows how long. As of right now, there is no way to run big LLMs in a privacy preserving manner. It just doesn't exist. You can't E2EE encrypt these servic…

Read https://security.apple.com/documentation/private-cloud-compu... . It's very thorough and as good as you could possibly do this.

Doesnt matter if it doesnt work. And by all accounts, Apple Intelligence has been a garbage fire.

Siri, even after decades of investment, is a joke. Apple does NOT have the talent or capability to deliver what people want.

Re: Apple Intelligence Foundation Language Models Tech Report 2025

#115

Post by bitpush »

dialup_sounds wrote: post #91
bitpush wrote: post #38

The more I think about Apple, the more I realize that Apple is so far behind. While other companies are pushing the envelope (OpenAI, Anthropic, Google ..) Apple's ambitions seem much much smaller. And this is after they made very big claims with Apple Intelligence last year, when they had everyone fooled. This is like watching a train-wreck in slow motion.

Apple is only "behind" if you think they're in the same race. They haven't shown any interest in developing frontier models or taking on the enormous costs of doing so.

Did you even watch Apple Intelligence ads? They were very much in the race, just that they got ahead of themselves a bit.

They were touting the same features that other companies are now delivering. Point the phone at something, and it'll tell you what you're looking at. Or summarize news articles etc. Instead we got .. emojithingy

Re: Apple Intelligence Foundation Language Models Tech Report 2025

#116

Post by alwillis »

floam wrote: post #102
alwillis wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The question is… will Apple be constantly tweaking these models, or only during OS upgrades? Certainly when new updates are released--going from macOS 26 to 26.1). They can probably push model updates between releases if necessary.

Per the PDF in this post: > “Adapters produced by the toolkit are fully compatible with the Foundation Models framework. However, each adapter is compatible with a single specific model version, meaning that a new adapter must be trained for each new version of the base model.” Any changes should require retraining any LoRA adapters that has been built & distributed by third party developers, so they wouldn’t update…

Makes sense; thanks for the clarification.

Re: Apple Intelligence Foundation Language Models Tech Report 2025

#117

Post by thebytefairy »

slashnode wrote: post #104
bitpush wrote: post #38

The more I think about Apple, the more I realize that Apple is so far behind. While other companies are pushing the envelope (OpenAI, Anthropic, Google ..) Apple's ambitions seem much much smaller. And this is after they made very big claims with Apple Intelligence last year, when they had everyone fooled. This is like watching a train-wreck in slow motion.

I think it's the right strategy for Apple. They're not a model company. The risks of deploying something half-baked to their users is unacceptable. They're taking it slow and trying to do it in a way that doesn't damage/erode their brand. Wait it out, let the best model(s) rise to the surface (and the hallucination problems to get sufficiently mitigated), and then either partner with a proprietary provider or deploy…

They already deployed half-baked models (eg needing to disable news summaries because they were so bad), and haven't delivered on other aspects of apple intelligence. This is hard to call being cautious, this is them not being able to keep up.

Re: Apple Intelligence Foundation Language Models Tech Report 2025

#118

Post by JKCalhoun »

martinald wrote: post #62
JKCalhoun wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I see it as the opposite. Apple is absolutely positioned to own "chat". I am not worried they'll soon sort things out — and eventually we'll have an LLM integrated into the iPhone; call it Siri or otherwise. With my history encrypted in the cloud, and the trust that Apple has built around privacy ... I think they're going to come out alright.

But they have de facto admitted failure of most of the strategy if the rumours are true that they are switching much harder to OpenAI/Anthropic for upcoming LLM products. This is the first time in 10+ years I've seen Apple so far on the back foot. They usually launch category defining products that are so far ahead of the competition, even by the time they work through the 'drawbacks' in the first versions of them th…

You're right about the RAM, of course. Apple will no doubt have to run that up. At the same time it's an obvious "top tier" feature for the "Apple aiPhone 17 Max". And it will cost dearly.

Re: Apple Intelligence Foundation Language Models Tech Report 2025

#119

Post by astrange »

0x457 wrote: post #110
astrange wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

An issue with this is that model quality can get a lot lower when you force it into a structured form, because it's out of distribution for the model. (I'm pretty sure this is actually what drove Microsoft Sydney insane.) Reasoning models can do better at this, because they can write out a good freeform output and then do another pass to transform it.

I have this toy agent I'm writing, I always laugh that I, human, write a code that generates human-readable markdown, that I feed to llm where I ask it to produce a json, so I can parse (by code I, or it wrote) and output in a consistent human-readable form. I'm thinking about let it output freeform and then use another model to use to force that into structured.

IIRC yaml is easier for models than json because you don't need as much recursive syntax.

Re: Apple Intelligence Foundation Language Models Tech Report 2025

#120

Post by t1amat »

astrange wrote: post #119
0x457 wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have this toy agent I'm writing, I always laugh that I, human, write a code that generates human-readable markdown, that I feed to llm where I ask it to produce a json, so I can parse (by code I, or it wrote) and output in a consistent human-readable form. I'm thinking about let it output freeform and then use another model to use to force that into structured.

IIRC yaml is easier for models than json because you don't need as much recursive syntax.

I doubt this is true anymore, if ever. Both require string escaping, which is the real hurdle. And they are heavily trained on JSON for tool calling.
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